TheNextWeb reports that Dutch news service NU.nl had to remove ads served by Google-owned Doubleclick because they weren't loading.

We could only verify the downtime for Canada which gives us a 502 server error and Google.us which seems to work for some but not for others:

Strangely enough adding ‘www’ in front of Google.ca does give us a Google front page which would suggest a simple DNS problem.

Gmail and Google Chat appear to be unavailable; Docs and Analytics seem to be fine.

UPDATE 4:05PM EST: According to Google's own Apps Status Dashboard, Google Mail appears to be down, reporting a "service outage." Yesterday, a service disruption was recorded.

UPDATE 4:09PM EST: TechCrunch notes that Google had a brief outage this morning and sent an alert to confirm the problem:

September 1, 2009 8:18:00 AM PDT
Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.

TC's Nik Cubrilovic notes that both the Google front-end and its back-end IMAP and POP servers are down.

We're aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 4:53:00 PM UTC-4 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 5:16:00 PM UTC-4 with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience. Users can access their email via IMAP or POP. You can find instructions for how to do this here.

UPDATE 4:57PM EST: Gmail reiterates IMAP access instructions on Twitter. They also posted about it on the official Gmail blog, naturally. They're handling this much better than the previous outage.

UPDATE 5:03PM EST: Gmail has now been down an hour for some users.

UPDATE 5:35PM EST: Gmail has come back to life. At 5:22, @donreisinger posted on Twitter, "Phew. My Gmail is back. Good thing." At 5:28, @randallb posted, "And we're back." Then the rest of the Twitter chorus joined in.

Andrew Nusca is a former writer-editor for ZDNet and contributor to CNET. He is also the former editor of SmartPlanet, ZDNet's sister site about innovation. He writes about business, technology and design now but used to cover finance, fashion and culture. He was an intern at Money, Men's Vogue, Popular Mechanics and the New York Daily Ne...
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